For those of you who love the audio edition, Vikas Adams is recording it right now and it should be available in September. To be notified when it drops (and get a lot of other awesome stuff before anyone else), sign up for my New Release Mailing List!

We're also working on the print edition right now and that should be up soon as well, so you can have dragons in whatever style you want!!

As always, thank you all so much for subscribing and reading! You're the reason these books exist, and I cannot thank you enough for being my fans.

Monday, July 10, 2017

I've been a fangirl of Joanna Penn's The Creative Penn since I first started wondering about self publishing. Naturally, then, when fans suggested Joanna and I do an interview on Twitter, I could not say yes fast enough, and here it is!!

We had a fantastic time, and if you enjoy publishing shop talk, I think you will, too. We talk abut writing fast (obvs), how to write for long stretches, marketing, working with spouses, creating story arcs, and a whole bunch more. It really was a blast, so go listen!

There's also a text transcript of the interview at the bottom of the post, in case you just want to read!

If you don't already read it, Joanna's Creative Penn is one of the best sources for serious business talk about indie publishing on the internet. I've been a fan for years and stolen many, many good ideas from her and her guests. Can not recommend enough! Thank you so much to Joanna for having me.

Of course, those of you are on my mailing list already know this, because I just sent you an exclusive link to an even bigger chunk of the book. Twice as big at least, because you're awesome like that :D!

So if you're on my mailing list, make sure to check your inboxes! And if you're not on my mailing list, why not? That's where all the good stuff is! It's free and I promise never to spam you or give your information to anyone else. I only send emails when I have books coming out or when I'm giving you exclusive content, like this sample and the Heartstrikers short story Mother of the Year, so if you're not signed up already, do it! If you like my books at all, it's basically a funnel of awesome stuff.

Friday, May 26, 2017

A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR comes out July 28!

I love this cover! Who is that fire dragon on Marci's shoulder, hmm?

To save his family from his tyrannical mother, Julius had to step on a lot of tails. That doesn’t win a Nice Dragon many friends, but just when he thinks he’s starting to make progress, a new threat arrives.

Turns out, things can get worse. Heartstriker hasn’t begun to pay for its secrets, and the dragons of China are here to collect. When the Golden Emperor demands his surrender, Julius will have to choose between loyalty to the sister who's always watched over him and preserving the clan he gave everything to protect.

At long last, the wait is over! The fourth Heartstrikers book, A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR comes out July 28!

What happened in China? Where's Marci? What the hell is Bob doing? I know book three left you with a lot of questions (because you flooded my inbox with them), but now the answers are finally upon us.

A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR is the next to last book in the Heartstrikers series (that's right! 5 books!). If you've liked the books so far, you are going to love this novel. It's huge, it's epic, it's full of dragon drama, Bob's pigeon wears a a cute little hat...I'm just totally in love with it, and I know you will be, too!

Closer to launch, I'll be posting an excerpt from the new book on my website, so keep your eyes on the blog or follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter to make sure you get in on that sweet sample chapter action.

As always, thank you all so so much for reading. I couldn't do any of this without you guys. You're the reason Julius, Marci, Bob, Chelsie, and everyone else is here, and I really can't thank you enough.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

See? We're not gone totally! In fact, I have a massive, crunchy, and highly informative blog post for you all today. This post was over a year (and more money than I'd like to admit) in the making. I do hope you all find it useful, we certainly have. Today's post is all about marketing, paid marketing in particular.

Which Paid Marketing Works for Books. (and which doesn't...)

This summer, we embarked on a massive marketing effort for No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished. I had the whole campaign planned out with something new and interesting happening every week or every other week. We had our target customers, channels, and funnels all setup. To complete the package, we tracked the crap out of everything we did.

For the important parts of this article, we ran Facebook ads, we used Amazon Marketing Services, we commissioned art, and dropped list bait. We did a LOT is what I'm saying.

We spent thousands of dollars on marketing and today I'm going to share our data with you.

I cannot bold that enough. This was, at the end of the day, a grand experiment for Aaron/Bach, LLC. We put down serious cash and we hired a professional data-driven marketing firm, Proof Industries to help us put it all together. Additionally, the whole effort coincided during a time of the year (launch) when we had maximum leverage working for us.

Now, I'm going to show you what we actually did, how well it's worked, and compare it to past marketing efforts to show how it stacks up. This is going to be one hell of a post.

So, first...

I want to plug the good folks over at Proof Industries. We threw an entire multi-channel marketing campaign at them in May and they made it happen starting in June. I could not have set up all the tracking infrastructure and hundreds of Facebook ads myself. They also helped us monitor the whole shebang as it happened and ran the post-mortem.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

As I'm sure you already know, we here at Team Aaron/Bach are all about the reals. We constantly look at all manner of numbers to figure out what works and what doesn't work for us in the business of writing, including sales, newsletter sign ups, and website traffic. We also keep an eye on the production side of the equation, mostly by analyzing how I, the source of new words, spend my work time.

This is nothing new. Measuring my time was a huge part how I got my writing from 2k to 10k words a day. But as Travis proved in his Novel Project Management post, actually getting solid, quality time to write is a constant challenge even after you go pro. There are just so many other things you could be doing that fall under the umbrella of "work"--blogging, Tweeting, planning, etc--that sometimes the writing gets shoved around a bit. A foolish mistake, because ultimately, the writing is the only work that really matters.

Over the last year, Trav and I have been involved in a grand experiment to see if we could grow our social media presence in both fiction and non-fiction. The experiment has now concluded, and having run the post-mortem, we've discovered a lot of things we never expected. I'll leave it to my Travis-of-business to go over what we learned about Facebook ads and so forth in another post, but from my perspective, the single biggest discovery in all of this was how much of my work time each week I was spending blogging.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. I only write one post a week at best. It can't take that much time, right?

This is what I always assumed, but the numbers say otherwise. As much as I love talking shop here on the blog, non-fiction is not my happy place. I'm a fiction girl first and forever. Writing books gives me energy. A good day of fiction will often leave me feeling ready to take on the world. Writing essays, on the other hand, takes energy. Energy and time. Four to five hours on average for each post, to be specific. It also interrupts my work flow. I won't go so far as to admit I call off early every blogging day, but let's just that Wednesdays are not 10k days. Too often, they aren't even 5k days.

This has been a persistent problem since we started the Writing Wednesday posts. At the beginning, I assumed I'd just get better, blogs would go faster, and everything would be great. Remember: I love writing these things! I love writing about writing, I love talking shop, and I love paying it forward. With all of that positive energy, I was sure I could get the time price down to something more reasonable. But a year later, the numbers are in, and I have to face the truth: I haven't gotten faster, and I can't keep losing a day out of every week.

To say I am not happy about this would be like saying "Bethesda likes power," but as always, the most important rule of being a good writer is being honest with yourself. The reals must come before the feels if I am to have any sort of accountability, and the reals are that if I want to get back to putting out more than one book a year, novel word counts have to come down, and the weekly time cost of blogging has to be cut. I'm still working on the former, but the latter begins today.

Wait, does this mean the blog going away?!

Not at all! Pretentious Title will still be updated regularly with fiction updates, publishing numbers, and business posts as new information comes in. The free sharing of information is my favorite aspect of the indie author community and a big factor in why I decided to go self pub in the first place. Everyone wins when we share, and Travis and I are still dedicated to experimenting and posting what we've learned about the new frontiers of self publishing so that we can all move forward together into a brighter, more profitable future.

But while you will still see regular posts on the blog, the weekly Writing Wednesday feature is being retired so that I can focus on what I should have been focusing on all along: writing books.

Bummer. So are you done writing about writing forever?

Absolutely not. I might be shifting my time focus back to fiction exclusively, but you can't stop me from talking shop. DO YOU HEAR ME, WORLD? I WILL NOT BE STOPPED!

Can't stop the rock!

Ahem.

So yes, there will undoubtedly still be writing posts, they just won't be on weekly schedule. I'll still update Facebook and Twitter when I post, though, so if you follow me on Social Media, you shouldn't miss anything even if the flow is no longer reliable. Also, all my previous Writing Wednesday posts will stay up, and I very much hope you continue to find them useful.

Is there a good side to all this?

YES! If you're a fan of my work, you've probably noticed the books are coming out mighty slowly for someone who gets 10k a day. We're talking one a year, which is the same pace I was at when I was traditionally published. Not so great for a nimble indie. -_-

Part of this slowness is because the Heartstrikers books have been way more complicated than I anticipated (And longer. Good Lord, those things are bricks), and part of it is because I've been dividing my writing time among too many side projects like this blog. But the great part about constantly analyzing your workflow is that you can see problems like this and fix them, which is exactly what I'm trying to do.

So readers, rejoice! If things go according to plan, you should have not one, but two new Heartstriker novels to read in the next twelve months, finishing out the series in Summer of 2017. Can I pull it off? Well, only Brohomir knows for sure, but it should be very possible. So keep your eyes open for that, and thank you all so so much as always for being my readers. I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to get these books out, but as you see, I'm doing my darnedest to fix the problem, and the waits should be much shorter from here out.

Finally, a huge thank you to all my Writing Wednesday readers. I'm sorry I couldn't pull it off, but I hope the posts I did get out helped you with your writing. I might be biased, but I think writing fiction is the most noble, worthy, and rewarding of all the arts, and I can't encourage you enough to keep practicing and honing your craft. Even if you never get published, you will still have built a creative skill very few people can boast, and that is a worthy goal in and of itself.

Thank you for reading, and I wish you the best best of luck in all your writing endeavors.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Rachel refused to come out of her writing cave this morning. Something about Dragons, interruptions, and tasty with ketchup. So it looks like I'm going to be doing the blog post today. Mwahahaha! Last week was a business post, so this week I'm going to try to keep it writerly with a post on settings and world building.

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Great World Building

I've been making my own settings since sixth grade. Not for books, but for the table top RPGs that I run for my friends. Surprisingly to me, this experience has been invaluable when I help Rachel world build for her series. In fact, one of the most crucial contributions I make to Rachel's books have to do with her settings. She's even written a post about my world-building help called My Husband, the World Wrecker.(RACHEL NOTE: This is true. All of my settings were either blatantly stolen from or enormously improved by Travis. Also, YOU GUYS, he is the best GM ever! Seriously. I learned so much of what I know about stories from being a player character in his games over these last 14 years. Just goes to show that you really do pick up novel writing skills from everywhere!)

I'm not a writer like Rachel, but this is something I've done a lot both together with her and on my own, so today I want to share with you some of the things I've picked up over my two decades and countless worlds worth of experience into what makes for really good world building. Now, this will be less "how to world build" and more "how I world build", but I hope that you all find this interesting none the less.

Starting Out, the Big Hook

All my best worlds start with a hook. The setting itself needs to have a core component that invokes curiosity, "OMG factor," an exciting twist, has implications, or invokes a sense of irony/dread.

However, I'm not a fan of every type of world hook. I definitely feel like some are better than others. Specifically, I'm a big big believer in the power of,

The contradiction. Aka, the mystery, the thing-that-doesn't-add-up, the glaring exception...

All the coolest settings I know of (including Eli, Devi, and Dragons ^_~) have the contradiction deep within them. Our brains are desperate for order. We instinctively crave for everything to make logical, or at least explainable, sense. When we see something that doesn't make sense, say a broken rule of the universe or society, the urge to know why it doesn't drives us nuts.

In story, just add on the fact that not-knowing might have deadly consequences and you'll get some great baked-in tension.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Today I'm going to talk about the Heartstriker short, Mother of the Year. I'm going to go over what it is, why we made it, and why it's available as it is. I'm sure ya'll will find this educational as there's a lot going on here. So far this experiment has been a rousing success, so read on and we'll get into,

What We Did With Mother of the Year and Why

"My only question (you didn't think i was going to politely leave without a question, did you?) concerns the Mother of the Year gambit.

I know you are not selling it, just making it available for those on your list, and this likely resulted in a LOT of people signing up. I'm just wondering how effective it was for the end game goal, not building a list per se but selling books. I understand your data probably doesn't have enough granularity to determine how many of the new signups went ahead and bought one or more of the Heartstriker series books. You could have each sold lot of MotY copies at $.99, so do you think you came out ahead with enough Heartstriker books sold to cover the loss of revenue had you sold MotY?"

@Tom Thanks! Also, I love questions! Please feel free to ask away.

My reply was a wall of text and I realized that it'd be better as a blog post. So let's talk all about Mother of the Year.

First off, what is Mother of the Year?

MOTY, the short story you can download, is an interview with Besthesda, The Heartstriker about her 5th autobiography titled Mother of Year. It's about 4000 words long and is less of a story and more of a TV show transcript. The work is supplemental to the main series, meaning that you don't need to read it to appreciate Heartstrikers. So while it might make some parts cooler, it's not essential.

It is only available for people who sign up for the new release mailing list. This last bit is the most important part. You cannot buy MOTY. It is list exclusive content.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

What ho, loyal readers! Rachel back again from the word mines where I have been slaving under dragons (very nice ones, but dragons nonetheless) to talk about...settings!

{Insert Cool Stuff Here}

Settings are one of those writing necessities that too often gets overlooked. If you've done any writing research, you've already read dozens of articles about crafting characters and worldbuilding and plotting. But while these elements are all very important, surprisingly little ink, digital or otherwise, is spent on how to craft and imagine the actual physical space your characters, world, and plot inhabit.

This is especially weird when you consider how important set design is to other story telling mediums. Theatre, movies, television, and video games all have professionals who've made careers out of set design. Likewise, comics--both American and manga--spend an enormous amount of time on backgrounds.

In all of these, what the space where the action takes place looks (and sounds) like is clearly a huge part of the experience of the story. So why do we as authors, who have the entire reader imagination at our disposal, who spend months to years perfecting our characters and plots, so often delegate our setting to cliches like "dark forest" or "big stone castle"?

The obvious answer here is that, unlike all the things I mentioned above, writing is not a visual medium. Other than our covers and the very occasional illustrated edition, we don't deal in pictures. Quite the opposite. Saying accurately what something looks like is one of the hardest things to do in writing. "A picture is worth 1000 words" can be a literal statement when you're writing a book, and who wants to waste that kind of narrative space on what's basically a long, info-dumpy description? No one, which is why one of the most common pieces of writing advice I see in Fantasy circles is "don't stop to describe the scenery."

Make no mistake, this is good advice! We've all read (and most likely put down) books that stop the action completely to spend 5 paragraphs describing a castle on a bluff or the crowds in a city market. These are both setting-establishing elements that a movie director could establish in one camera pan, but would take us writers pages of tension-breaking description text to achieve the same effect, which is why you don't see them much in good fiction. They simply take way too long to do.

At the same time, though, creating an interesting, memorable, atmospheric world is a huge part of writing memorable fiction, especially in genre. However interesting your characters, plot, and world are, if you set them in a very generic Fantasy setting that relies on cliches to fill in your backgrounds, you are setting yourself up to be at least partially forgettable.

So how do you strike a balance? How do you create and then describe a setting that's unique enough to be memorable without spending a thousand extra words and killing your tension in the process?

It's a tricky balance, but there are definitely a few best practices I've learned over the years to make it easier. So, without further ado, let's talk about...

Unless you have a very strong image of a place or scene in your head already (or you're actively writing one right now), chances are you haven't given much thought to your settings yet. To be clear, I'm not talking about World Building. I've gone over that whole other kettle of fish in detail already. This post is all about actual, physical location. The places where your characters live and your action takes place.

If we were working on movies or video games or any of the visual mediums, we would call this set design, and it would be a huge freaking deal. How many movies have you watched where just looking at the set was enough to create strong expectations of what was coming before any characters spoke or any plot had been laid down?

Hobbiton, I'm looking at you.

Oh yeah, that's powerful mojo. Of course, we writers don't have these visual elements to work with, but that's no excuse not to have creative and interesting locations. We are still storytellers and entertainers. It is our job to be as interesting as possible, and creating really cool settings is a huge part of that, so let's talk about how to do it.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

I'm sure you are wondering what I'm doing here on a Wednesday post instead of Rachel. Well, after last week's blogging ate three of Rachel's mornings, we have come to the long-building conclusion that we're both blogging too much. Books aren't getting written and that means Things-Have-To-Change(TM) around here.

We're still going to update everywhere Wednesday with new advice and helpful posts, but Rachel and I will be alternating who's up each week.

Anyway, there's been a lot of requests for marketing posts and, as I'm always asking for post requests, I'm going to try my best. Marketing is a HUGE topic ya'll. People get degrees and spend lifetimes perfecting it as a skill. In a way, we're always talking about marketing here in some form or another.

Since "marketing books" is too big a topic, I'm instead going to list and talk about every single book marketing tactic that I know of. It's going to be a,

Book Marketing Tactics Round-Up

We all need some practical, effective, actionable information to sell books with. While there's loads of abstract marketing strategy we need to talk about, books still need to sell and we all have work to do. SO, let's focus on the pragmatic stuff today and I'll have more abstract strategy talk for ya'll on another day.

What, specifically, can you do to market a book?

I'm going to try to list things in the order of power/importance they will have on your book's sales.

2k to 10k

If you like my writing posts, you'll love my book!

Coming Soon!

Out Now!

Kick-Ass Science Fiction

The Book That Started It All

Who are you again?

My name is Rachel Aaron/Rachel Bach, and I write the books you see over there on the left. I also play video games, watch anime, read manga, and read a TON of books. I love great sword fights, witty dialog, and charming rogues (except for the ones who stunlock me).